Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post here if you have any strategy tips to share
counting
Level 8 user
Posts: 843
Joined: Wed Jan 29, 2014 12:44 am
Been thanked: 1 time

Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by counting »

Over the years, there are many who posted their strategies, but spread out in different places. Let's do a headcount and preferably added links that can show pictures/saves as reference, or just share your strategies or tactics in replies. I'll started a list below with brief descriptions added :

For newbie introduction videos , English introduction video, see a tutorial by WilliamMGary, French introduction video by Leif & Sukhoi, German Introduction video by Myratax, and Chinese tutorial and scenario videos of Capitalism 2 by 静若

Basic Strategies :

* Retail Empire : The most basic strategy for beginner and almost never failed, buy low and sell high, the basic rule of commerce. For newbie introduction video, see a tutorial by WilliamMGary.

* Real Estate Mogul : After new features added in CapLab, real estate mogul is not so tedious anymore. Borrow as much as you can and start buildings. Gather your steady revenue and get more loans. Make sure your expansion never ends.

* Media Empire : Information is power, those who control everyone else's advertisement budget will never run out of business. But with setup cost and overhead expenses so high, can you survive the infancy of your media firms and dominate the media landscape before others set their foot in?

* Tech vendors : One of the most difficult AI strategy to emulate by human player, unlike AI who can analysis all opponents' tech level in merely milliseconds, human have to pause the game and click through all the data and analysis AIs' tech developments, then decide which long term R&D project will be important in the future. It's a high risk strategy, require a lot of foresight about AI's strategies and their collective research goals.

* Farmer's Heaven : The classic strategy recommended by many seasonal players dated back to Cap+. In ten years' worth of maximum training budget, you can get a constant cash flow and 100 quality farm products forever without any worries about catching up with tech. Choose those products that can be sold directly to retail stores, and open your own supermarket chains to get maximum profit. Later on, it's easy to step into semi-product crops with complete control of raw materials. Links to tosh's on success of farming + retail in 2 years

* Stock Vulture : Playing with stock market, you need to be ruthless. Hovering like a vulture, at the same time being as calm as a rock, and hold your breath till the very last moment to sell. With enough capital accumulated and controlling multiple subsidiaries, you have the power to take over the world in seconds using subsidiaries' hard earn money. However, this is not without risk, just as many time you can end up betting the wrong stock as you are right. Usually other stock focused companies' stocks are good choices as well, rarely do their stock price fall behind. And real estate stocks are the low risk safe bet due to guarantee rent income and ample assets, but their price also rise slowly. The retailers are stars, and price rise quickly in early game, however they plateaued at certain point. Other stocks rise and falls almost as complicated as in real stock market, but usually you can still tell how they will perform in the future by checking their annual profit graphic in corporation details. It's more accurate than any historic price analysis.

* Timber Tinker : Also one of the famous old strategies since Cap2. Logging camp is the cheaper raw materials to start with, and it's related furniture product class has relatively high profit margin. Timber also have other use, and AIs always seem to wanted more wood. So you can easily sold your excessive timber from the beginning. The only downside is associated high freight cost. Best build your retail stores near your furniture factories.

* Mining Cartel : Mining, often include Logging and Oil, the upstream to almost everything, the flip side of Farmer's Heaven. This is a relatively new strategy, and required high starting capital to pull off. But once you are able to secure the required fund, usually you won't lack AI customers once you have monopoly in raw material production. AI has a bad habit of under produce raw materials, so with enough AI waited raw materials, they will flock to your source even if the price is outrageously high. And you are free to setup any downstream industries without worrying limited raw material supply. The downside of this strategy is usually you start slow, in order for AIs to gradually build up their demands in decades. If you like long game, this is a strategy that starts slow, but nearly unstoppable into the late game.

* Troll Stamp : A variation of retailer strategy after the introduction of warehouses in CapLab. Relabel high quality AI product using corporate brand and sold them to unclaimed market in different city. Saving all the cost associated with production and R&D. Act quick and make a killing before AI follows you. Constantly searching for more playmates to get high quality products possible, and relabel these products as your own brand again. Troll your opponents as fast as you can.

* Hijacker Guild : Using Troll Stamp strategy in Mining Cartel. And on top of stamping their ore/timber/oil into your own brand, you also need to artificially induce shortage with mass purchasing bandwidth and store their raw materials as your own. This results in source AIs set their sale's policy to internal sale. Then it's your time to resell the stockpile in your warehouse to other desperate AIs at very high price. But you need to act fast and not too greedy, or one of the customers with enough cash will open another new source soon. This strategy can be used alongside legit Mining Cartel strategy to shut down opponents' mines.


Combo Strategies

* Food and Snacks : The normal follow up of Farmer's Heaven, when you control milk, frozen chicken, egg, cocoa, strawberry, wheat, corn, lemon and sugar, with the backup of 100 quality farm products, no AI can catch up to all of your Food and Snack product quality, since relative high percentage of the quality comes from raw materials.

* WGBP : Wineries, Grape/Glass, Beverages, and Perfume. This combo is powerful, because wine and perfume both have high brand concern, low price concern, thus the price margin can be huge. And wine has very high percentage of quality comes from grape, and perfume is the opposite. As long as you hold on to high grade grape, and high tech perfume, your profit margin will be ridiculous. Another upside is you can push into industries required silica and chemical as raw materials, which include almost 50% of all products, and more if you count aluminum required for producing Cola.

* Je/Wa : Jewelers and Watchmakers. Since they all sold in same type of shop with the smallest 2x2 stores, you can squeeze them everywhere. Jewelries also depend heavily on raw material quality, hence it's a natural follow up of Mining Cartel opening. Watch making business can be the entry to other products, since they share so many basic components with electronics type products. You can easily share production in the same factory with them, especially big money maker like computers, communication devices, electronics, and toys.

* Drug-PCB : Drug with Plastics, Cosmetics, and Body care products. A toxic combo with advantage similar to both WGBP and Je/Wa, but heavily tech oriented. All of them need high tech level to get high quality. At the same time their products have high profit margin due to low price concern. Be prepared to keep up techs with lots of R&D centers and big advertisement spending on brand rating, ranged or corporate brand are quite useful in this strategy. At the same time they also have small 2x2 retail stores. This strategy used to be very powerful in Cap2 with just drugs and cosmetic, but nerfed down in CapLab. However if you add body cares and plastics in the equation, it's a different story. Not only do you get another class to make profit, but also since plastic is a major semi-product that can be used elsewhere easily. Hence if profit margin starts to drop, you can venture into other plastic related products using your many highly trained R&D centers to catch up.

* High Tech Boom : One of the classics. This combo never failed me whether in Cap2 or CapLab. The big 3CE have so many not-yet-invented new products, you can have insanely high profit margin once you finished discovering new products. They also have insanely high revenue, you can overshadow any AI easily. The big 3CE are : Computer Class, Communication Class, Cars, and Electronic store products, including home appliances and photography products, sometime you can also count Toy class. They all required same set of base materials, steel, plastics, silica based semi-products, aluminum, few chemical and rubber that can be purchased easily. Few ingredients, yet so many possibilities and products you can choose from. This is a flexible and lucrative sector, the only challenge is AI knows it too, so be prepared to meet your competitors head on.

* Steel Maniac : Another follow up to Mining Cartel, with the control of iron, coal and steel you can control many downstream industries. Usually players don't realize how crucial steel is. Once you control its production and monopoly of it, you have the power to influence AIs' productions, and hold their life lines in your hand. This strategy can be a precursor to the strategy like High Tech Boom, once you strangle your opponent's ability to produce more steel related products, you can eliminate your competitions in their cradles, and never have to face them head on with price war.

* COPE : The sister strategy of Steel Maniac. which control another sets of strategic resources - Chemicals, Oils, Plastics, and Electronic Components. This can be the precursor of Drug-PCB, but also has the strangling power beyond Drug-PCB products. COPE controls majority of the big 3CE products as well. Hence this can also be use as a less powerful blocker for High Tech Boom competitions.

* Fashion Farmer : This is a follow up to another set of farm crops and pasture products - cotton, flex, robber, wool, leather, linen, textile, with some mining related semi-product dyestuff and polyester. They belong to a group of self-containing product classes - Apparel class, Footwear class, Leather goods class, and the Backpack from Sport Equipment class. If you have a solid Farmer's Heaven start and plan ahead with these farm crops, you can walk into these products easily with few outside resources. The challenge in this strategy is similar to High Tech Boom, AIs also seem to know these isolated group of products, and venture into them even if these product classes aren't AIs' expertise.

* Lonely Tobacco : Tobacco product class is probably the most isolated product class in the game. Even with max 30 AIs, it's still a no-competition market most of the time. Since tobacco crop is exclusively used for them, you need to have your own source. You can get a reasonable profit when you can easily get monopoly on them. The downside of this strategy is that tobacco product market isn't very big, your revenue and profit from them will be fairly limited.


Tactics :

* Warehouse Showroom : The idea of using warehouses for advertisements have been brought up since the introducing of warehouses. And Camio brought the idea into another step, instead of fulfilling the actual warehouse function, the warehouse only have input units and advertisement units, so it doesn't output anything, but functions as a pure advertisement product showroom. You can use multiple warehouse showrooms for multiple media firms in the city, and easily control media budgets by just checking them, instead of flipping through all the retail units. This trick is best used when you control most media firms, or in late game where micromanaging becomes too tasking.

* Warehouse Wholesaler : The decision between whether going into retail business or stay as wholesalers is often difficult to make at the beginning with limited funds. If you stay as pure wholesalers using just factory sales, you often feel you are exploited by AIs, and should make more profit than that (Since AIs have to pay freight cost in wholesales, their decision to make wholesale purchases or not depend heavily on your factory location). Besides, if you want "wholesale product" to have higher price, you will waste precious space in factory for advertisement units. This is where the CapLab warehouse can help, by treating warehouse like "wholesale retail stores". You can place warehouses closer to AIs retail stores, a cluster of AI retail stores nearby is like having a high "wholesale product traffic index" (use filtering retail store types to show AI store clusters on mini-map). You can even charge different cities with different wholesale prices when you tweak their wholesale prices properly. And of course wholesale warehouses give you more space to place advertisement units.

* 1984 Branding: Proposed by infoscott, this is a tactic about brand management, especially corporate or ranged brand, named after the famous Super Bowl ad Apple Computer aired in 1984 to launch the Macintosh computer line. Be stealth and be patient, then deliver knock out blow with lightly speed. Adopt corporate brand strategy but do not immediately use heavy advertising. Wait until you can maintain a technology lead and enough production capacity to satisfy a large market demand. Then launch a massive advertising campaign to quickly gain awareness, and use your quality rating to further gain loyalty over time. Use the extra profit margin gained from a rapidly rising product rating to grab market share and/or expand profits. Use your technology superiority to strike your competitors' customers and make them less loyal.

* Flight to the Suburbs : A tactic proposed by infoscott, locate your initial business near downtown early in the game, pay real estate premium, but relocate these businesses mid-game and back fill with residential or commercial buildings. This is much more productive than just buying bare land plots. Best businesses for this tactic are factories, warehouses, and farms. When you relocate your businesses, you only pay for the relocation fee and keep the training, productions levels, and business links. You can also gain an early advantage in freight costs if you co-locate these early businesses in the prime real estate areas, such as closer to the ports. Also early downtown businesses usually can reduce the freight cost a great deal. You can even combined this with wholesales tactics to encourage AIs to buy from you.

* Second Chair : Link to original post by Etym, this is a defense tactic to hold position in price war. Set your product rating one point behind opponent's. It sets 100, you set 99, it sets 70, you set 69. Even though in the long run you are losing market share, but it's a very slow process. Hence you can still keep decent profit for a very long time, and have time to devise other means to deal with your opponents (by over tech, by strangle their resources, by merger, or simply move to other products and avoid direct confrontation)

* Poison Apple : by lucks, This is a strategy to deal with opponents' low quality low price product in a price war. Essentially by advertise your opponent's low quality products. First, AI will be glad to get higher rating and raise price above normal. Wait a while, then cut off the advertisement. After months of bad user experience of low quality and overcharge price, followed by gradually fallen rating, its brand loyalty will suffer greatly, customers will not trust its brand for a while. This is most effective when AI is using ranged brand or corporate brand.

* Multiple R&D : Sometimes a level 9 all connected 9 units R&D still can't let you catch up with your opponents, and you need to be on par with your competitors in short term, but also make huge leap in the future to win tech war. Obviously your opponent will never sell its tech to you, and you don't have time to wait for second hand techs. Under this circumstance, you can use more R&D centers to research the same tech, and spread out their finishing time. Essentially trading R&D center's maintenance cost with faster tech level up steps. Be aware that due to constant tech level up, your manufacturing unit's level also drops more frequently. A more detailed explanation on how and why this tactic works can be found in the reply here.

* Freebie Grabber : This is a very old tactic since Cap2. Drop the product price down to $0.01 and quickly get all the market share and force your opponent out, then rise the price back up to gain monopoly and high profit margin. This is the extreme form of price war where you make the first strike with nukes. But CapLab AIs have been improved to deal with it a lot better than Cap2 AIs, and will last longer before giving up. Also since you gave freebie products to customers for a while, so the average rating goes up very quickly. Once you start charging normally, your brand might drop like a rock and hard to recover.

* Supply Raid : Hit enemy from behind, and raid their upstream suppliers by mass purchasing the source materials or semi-products, even enemy-owned sources, since AIs usually don't set internal sale unless demand is way higher than supply. Use the resource from raid to manufacture your own product quickly before AIs turn into internal sale. Use the time when enemy's production dry up and before they can regain resource, take over their market share. Once your market share is establish, usually it's easy to hold on to.

* Land plot blocker : When starting capital is low, you don't have enough cash to buy whole 2x2 or 3x3 land plot at high traffic index spot, but retail focus AIs will move in pretty quick. In this situation, you can place just a few 1x1 spots inside your intended target area, and block AIs from ever building anything on it, until you have enough capital to build the store and purchasing rest of the land. An example can be seen in this screenshot, with 4 1x1 plots, they block a wider area

* Cook Book : Since the corporate income statement in game is not a consolidated financial statement, but only the summary of all firms'. You can inflate your corporation revenue and profit using some tricks with warehouses. First, increase your factories output price as high as possible. Second, build warehouses only to purchase and store these price-inflated products without selling them. That's it. Once the inflated products start to flow into warehouse, your total assets increase due to inventory level gets bloated, source factories get the revenue and profit boost, and the storing warehouses only cost tiny amount of maintenance expenses. Essentially, you corporation will get increased assets, revenue, and profit on paper by moving things around with phony purchases (a lot like how real life crook does it). The obvious downside of this trick is that it can only sustain until warehouses are full. Once these price-inflated products are taken out of warehouses and sell at normal price, your bloated revenue and profit drops back to normal with huge loses shown on paper. Still, this trick is not just a number's game for accounts. During the temporary boost period, your unsuspected stock holders can't tell the difference between real sales and phony sales, thus you are "free" to enjoy the benefit of better stock performance and higher loan limit (until your are busted ofc)


Special rules for challenges :

* Iron man : A general challenge rule that can be applied to many games, where players are not allow to reload previous saves, only continuous saves. Public Challenge Games in CapLab has similar scoring rule, doesn't allow changing your recorded score after posted, using an end-of-the-year autosave mechanism. However it is allowed to drop out in mid-point and reload to a previous save point to improve score after the drop-out point.

* 1-city challenge : Deal with an limited and easily saturated local market, and compete with as many AIs as possible in close proximity.

* The middleman challenge : Only allow to produce certain types of semi-products exclude farming products, and try to survive AIs' attack from all sides. A script to help facilitate this challenge can be found here.

* The embezzler : Accumulate as many personal cash as possible within a limited time frame, without losing control of your own company.

* David vs Goliath : Added additional rules on top of the default max 331% difficulty rating. Like not allow to have less than 50% share of your company's stock, or combined with 1-city challenge and boost the difficulty to 361%. Even turn off the stock market. Can anyone survive the brutality, and defeat Goliath? Links to players' strategies on low capital startup

* MAD : Mutually Assured Discount War. You must raise all your selling product rating above AIs(if you are not monopoly) at least 1 point at the end of each month. This will result in catastrophic price war with mutually assured discount and huge price drop quickly. Only when opponent's products are out of the market, then you can raise the price back up to the level you see fit. Iron man rule automatically applied. Go head-to-head and toe-to-toe with your opponents.

* Walmart challenge : Although retail is generally the easiest way of doing business, but purely retailing without manufacturing and still dominating retail sector is quite hard. Many strategies and tricks are needed to create a retail empire like Walmart.


Integrated strategies and special reports :

* Tips and Tricks by mwyeoh, although it's for earlier version, but the general GOLDEN RULES for business always apply to both in game and in real world. P.S. chrishaas61's stock manipulation trick no long worked in current version.

* williet4038 on the warehouse utlitization

* Hans_Lemurson on Cost Analysis for Firms of Different Sizes

* Hans_Lemurson and counting on Store Placement, Production Efficiency and Capacity

* Esoteric Rogue on R&D effectiveness of semi-product

* The middleman report by counting


Some Small Tips and Interesting Theories :

* Small tips

* Channel Stuffing : the reverse Cook Book

* Food Traffic Spinning : the effect of nearby buildings to traffic flow

* Loan Credit line limit calculation : Cash + Land and Resources + 1/3 of stock value

* Bank concentration & entrepreneurship studies

* Brand Awareness and Loyalty theories


I'll keep updating links with associate contents. Feel free to provide links or pictures/save files in the replies, so we can gather all the useful information easily for new players to look up.
Last edited by counting on Mon May 18, 2015 8:33 am, edited 14 times in total.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Twitch channel : twitch.tv/ancientbuilder
Youtube channel : www.youtube.com/user/countingtls
-------------------------------------------------------------------
tosh
Level 3 user
Posts: 52
Joined: Sun Jan 12, 2014 4:36 pm

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by tosh »

counting good job! thanks a lot, learned a lot.
jondonnis
Level 5 user
Posts: 283
Joined: Sat Jul 24, 2010 12:53 am

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by jondonnis »

Had an idea but would it be classed as a tactic or exploiting? I've not tried to see if it works.

Taking the warehouse showroom idea. Buy up a failing media firm then create a showroom to advertising some of your own products. Spend 500k advertising the products at your new failing media firm. This can make it look like the media firm is making a lot of money. Once you get it back in the black, keep doing this for a while. Once profits are up put it up for sale. As it's now successful the AI may offer to buy it for a nice profit. Then drop all your advertising to it from the warehouse. Sell the products on from the warehouse then sell it.

Just an idea, I maybe totally wrong in how the mechanics work.
Camio
Level 2 user
Posts: 32
Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2014 8:25 pm

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by Camio »

In my current game, a CPU company decided to buy the 3 media firms in Shanghai plus another in Tianjin, all in 1990. I decided to check the company's share and they are hovering around 4-5$ so I figured I'd merge that company into mine and get the 4 media firms for less than 300m.

Having decided that, and also having decided I wouldnt advertise for the time being in Shaghai and the radio in Tianjin 'till I own the firms, I decided to check something I wasnt sure about. I saved, started to advertising in the 4 firms like I was donig in the other firms in the other cities (so 2.5M a month on each firm, so 10m total a month) to see if it'd influence the shares price.

It didnt (it had 0 effect). This means what you described wouldnt work (using the same logic).
jondonnis
Level 5 user
Posts: 283
Joined: Sat Jul 24, 2010 12:53 am

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by jondonnis »

I'm not talking about share price, I'm talking about the money being made by the media firms. I could be wrong, but it seems the AI only offers to buy the media firms if they appear to be in the black. If they are in the red, losing money, I never seem to get an offer. So the idea is to essentially inflate the profits with your own advertising, to see if the AI then buys. Then cut all advertising after. Gonna load my save and try it.
counting
Level 8 user
Posts: 843
Joined: Wed Jan 29, 2014 12:44 am
Been thanked: 1 time

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by counting »

jondonnis wrote:I'm not talking about share price, I'm talking about the money being made by the media firms. I could be wrong, but it seems the AI only offers to buy the media firms if they appear to be in the black. If they are in the red, losing money, I never seem to get an offer. So the idea is to essentially inflate the profits with your own advertising, to see if the AI then buys. Then cut all advertising after. Gonna load my save and try it.
I think the profitability depends on how soon AIs offer to buy your "inflated" media firms. Remember that although these media firms looked profitable, your entire corporation may not. Media firms have very high overhead cost you have to maintain while waiting for buyers. You might not be able to earn a profit, if AIs wait too long. It is difficult to tell when will AI make an offer though.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Twitch channel : twitch.tv/ancientbuilder
Youtube channel : www.youtube.com/user/countingtls
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Kapseljd
Level 2 user
Posts: 36
Joined: Tue Apr 22, 2014 10:39 am

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by Kapseljd »

Thanks Counting
John aka. Kapseljd
Dutch (the Netherlands)
counting
Level 8 user
Posts: 843
Joined: Wed Jan 29, 2014 12:44 am
Been thanked: 1 time

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by counting »

openbu.org wrote:*Retreat,Merger
Retreat in the product market, Attack in the capital market(Merger).
This is my strategy.

撤退,用李嘉诚的话来说就是:“不要跟一个行业谈太长时间的恋爱。不赚最后一个铜板。“
其实工厂九宫格模式,基本无行业退出壁垒(投入大量研发与广告除外),采购其他原材料就可以生产别的产品,或原材料都不用换,直接在制造单元转产。

兼并,当撤退之后,给竞争对手就留下了足够的成长空间,然后再股票市场去兼并收购某项业务,或许不错,但AI的水平实在差劲。
I believe what Sir Ka-shing Li said "Don't earn the last dim" or "Don't feel attached to a certain business" is mostly about market saturation. It's similar to the old Chinese phrase : "見好就收" (Fall back when you are ahead). So what you were saying about "retreat" isn't that bad of a strategy for real world businesses when some product is nearly saturated and the competition drives the profit margin to nearly 0.

As a game strategy, retreat is mostly about dealing with AI competitive market as well, like I mentioned in Second Chair "simply move to other products and avoid direct confrontation", what players can do besides direct confrontation could be going to other less competitive product or like you said play the capital game. However, it would be unwise to retreat, if you are the monopoly supplier who saturate the market in the first place. Human players usually can be more efficient at monopoly than AI. (Although sometimes a diversified strategy AI could grow out of control very quickly, and players can't do anything about it at stock market either).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Twitch channel : twitch.tv/ancientbuilder
Youtube channel : www.youtube.com/user/countingtls
-------------------------------------------------------------------
counting
Level 8 user
Posts: 843
Joined: Wed Jan 29, 2014 12:44 am
Been thanked: 1 time

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by counting »

Update a tactic proposed by infoscott : "Flight to the Suburbs"
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Twitch channel : twitch.tv/ancientbuilder
Youtube channel : www.youtube.com/user/countingtls
-------------------------------------------------------------------
infoscott
Level 3 user
Posts: 64
Joined: Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:04 pm

Re: Capitalism Strategies and Tactics Collections

Post by infoscott »

In the real world there is a limited form of Cook Book known as Channel Stuffing. The manufacturer (factory) will oversell product to the distributors (warehouse) in order to make their sales quotas. If the retail market (retail firm) can not sell enough of the product to the end user, then either the manufacturer has to cut back on sales in the next reporting period, and/or the distributor returns a lot of the unsold product. The price fixing usually comes in terms of discount incentives to the distributors to take product off the manufacturer's hands.

When I worked in computer product distribution back in the 1990s, channel stuffing was a big deal. I'm sure even today there are supply chains for which channel stuffing is a periodic problem.
Post Reply